Why Not Talk to Tehran?

In the fall of 1956, Nikita Khrushchev threatened to rain rockets down on London for the British invasion of Suez and sent his tanks into Budapest to drown the Hungarian Revolution in blood.

He blew up the Paris summit in 1960, banged his shoe at the UN, and warned Americans, “We will bury you!”

He insulted John F. Kennedy in Vienna, built the Berlin Wall, and began secretly to place missiles in Cuba capable of annihilating every city in the Southeast, including Washington.

Those were sobering times and serious enemies.

Yet in the Eisenhower-Kennedy years, living under a nuclear Sword of Damocles unlike any the world had ever known, we Americans were on balance a cool, calm and collected crowd.

How then explain the semi-hysteria and near panic in circles of this city over the possibility President Obama might meet with President Hassan Rouhani and hold negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program?

We hear talk of Hitler in the Rhineland, of a new Munich, of America failing to act as Britain failed to act, until, back to the wall, it had no choice but to fight. The old Churchill quotes are heard once again.

But is the Ayatollah Hitler? Is Rouhani von Ribbentrop? Is Iran the Fourth Reich? Should we be very very afraid?

Iran, we are told, is the most dangerous enemy America faces.

But is this true?

Depending on one’s source, Iran’s economy is 2 to 4 percent of ours. After oil and gas, its big exports appear to be caviar, carpets and pistachio nuts. Inflation is unbridled and Iran’s currency is plummeting.

“Lacking money, Iran’s national soccer team scrapped a training trip to Portugal. Teachers in Tehran nervously awaited their wages, which were inexplicably delayed by more than a week. Officials warned recently that food and medicine imports have stalled for three weeks because of a lack of foreign currency.”

Should Iran start a war, the sinking of its coastal navy would be a few days’ work for the Fifth Fleet. Its air force of U.S. Phantoms dating to the Shah and few dozen MiGs dating to the early 1990s would provide a turkey shoot for Top Gun applicants.

In 30 days, the United States could destroy its airfields, missile sites and nuclear facilities, and impose an air and naval blockade that would reduce Iran to destitution.

And Iran is not only isolated economically.

She is a Shia nation in a Muslim world 90 percent Sunni, a Persian nation on the edge of a sea of 320 million Arabs. Kurds, Azeris, Arabs and Baluch make up close to half of Iran’s population. War with America could tear Iran apart.

Why then would Tehran want a war—and with a superpower?

Answer: It doesn’t. Since the 1979 revolution, Iran has attacked no nation and gone to war once—to defend herself against Saddam Hussein’s aggression that had the backing of the United States.

In that war, the Iranians suffered the worst poison gas attacks since Gamal Abdel Nasser used gas in Yemen and Benito Mussolini used it in Abyssinia. Iran has thus condemned the use of gas in Syria and offered to help get rid of it.

Last year, Iran’s departing president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who frightened so many, made a simple logical point about Iran’s supposed bomb program:

“Let’s even imagine that we have an atomic weapon, a nuclear weapon. What would we do with it? What intelligent person would fight 5,000 American bombs with one bomb?”

Yet, still, the beat goes on. “There is no more time to hold negotiations,” says Israel’s Strategic Affairs Minister Yuval Steinitz, Iran is only six months from developing an atom bomb.

Yet the New York Times reports Monday, “American intelligence experts believe Iran is still many months if not years away from having such a weapon.” Time to clear this up.

Congress should call James Clapper, head of national intelligence, and pin him down publicly on these questions:

Has Iran made the decision to build an atom bomb? Does Iran even have all the ingredients for a bomb? If Iran made a decision to build a bomb would we know about it? And how long would it take for Iran to build and test a nuclear device?

Americans were misled, deceived and lied into one war. Let’s not follow the same crowd into another.

Obama is being urged not to meet with Rouhani, as the man has a checkered past. Yet U.S. presidents met three times with Stalin, three with the Butcher of Budapest, once with Chairman Mao.

Compared to these fellows, Hussein Rouhani looks like Ramsey Clark.

Query: If Iran has the scientific and industrial capacity to build a bomb—and all agree it has—what could conceivably be the reason Iran has not yet done so?

Writing last summer in “Foreign Affairs” Kenneth N. Walz wrote “Why Iran Should Get the Bomb — Nuclear Balancing Would Mean Stability” in which he argued:

Israel’s regional nuclear monopoly, which has proved remarkably durable for the past four decades, has long fueled instability in the Middle East. In no other region of the world does a lone, unchecked nuclear
state exist. It is Israel’s nuclear arsenal, not Iran’s desire for one, that has contributed most to the current
crisis. Power, after all, begs to be balanced. What is surprising about the Israeli case is that it has taken
so long for a potential balancer to emerge…The current tensions are best viewed not as the early stages of a relatively recent Iranian nuclear crisis but rather as the final stages of a decades-long Middle East nuclear crisis that will end only when a balance of military power is restore.”

The current Iranian regime still shows no inclination to redressing this chronic Middle East power imbalance by acquiring nuclear weapons. In fact the recently-elected Rouhani government seems strongly committed to a negotiated settlement to the nuclear issue that would allow it internationally-inspected enrichment of uranium for power generation and medical research, but not for weaponry.

Pat Buchanan’s “query” [and answer] call for President Obama to seize upon this unique opportunity for meaningful negotiations:

“Query: If Iran has the scientific and industrial capacity to build a bomb—and all agree it has—what could conceivably be the reason Iran has not yet done so?

I am reading “Israel in the Second Iraq War” by former CIA analyst Stephen C. Pelletiere, PhD. The book’s subtitle is “The Influence of Likud.

The author shows how, more than anything else, the Iraq war was a product of the ideology of the Likud Party in Israel. Likud appears to have recycled hundred-year old British imperialist attitudes towards the Arabs: born to be herded about by imperial powers; as Israel, through the US, aspires to be. Pelletiere refers to the NeoCons more accurately as “Likudniks”.

In the argument over whether Halliburton and the Saudi’s or AIPAC kicked off the war Pelletiere provides a sophisticated analysis of the ideology of neo-imperialism that germinated into the Iraq war and the proposed Iran war.

Here’s what’s sad. That Our Republican leadership did no so engage every leadership in conversation — including N. Korea. It remains one of the most ignorant choices of conservates — not to engage – even the so called ‘axis of evil’.

Now it apeears the current WH occupant is going to get the gravy not nby his choices but by the choices of others.

Sinking the conservative movement into a deper sink hole of lousy choices and poor leadership.

Not often, buy sometimes, it just makes one dispair that the least moral advocacy has so much ground.

What a beauty! Too many powerful people in the US make too much money running a war. Talk to the man, Mr.President! Do not be affraind to appear weak to idiots. They will hate you no matter what. I think it was Larry Kudlow’s voice who said:”Americans are against the war in Syria because they do not trust the current president”. It looks like it did not occur to him that may be Americans realized that that trusted too much to the previous president.

Washington wants us to believe that Iran is a terrible, horrible, evil threat to our values our freedom and our very lives. Iran is so bad that talking to them would be like talking to a rattle snake. As time goes by fewer and fewer Americans are buying this kind of crap.

Besides – only a girly man gives his enemy the silent treatment. Recent American Emperors have been a laughing stock.

James, in the past I have expressed the view that the prime suspects in the Iraq War were an alliance of military contractors, the petrochemical industry, and the Saudis. And Israel was dragged along by the NeoCons.

Pelletier gets at a much more subtle cause: the revival of 19th Century imperial ideology by the Likud party and it spread to US ruling circles.

Minor point – Khrushchev’s line “we will bury you” is misunderstood. In Russian idiom, it means to live longer than someone, so you can be at their funeral (even in English we might say we buried someone when we mean we were at the funeral).

The “Attack Iran” crowd seems to hold two opposing ideas at the same time. 1 – Iran is an expansionist power, working ever faster towards a nuclear weapon, and past theories of containment will not work against a religiously governed regime. 2 – But, if we attack Iran now, they are in no position to really retaliate against us, and they will learn not to pursue nuclear weapons.

@Michael N. Moore – – I see much of the noise about American “empire” as essentially a cover story to obscure the fact the US squanders fantastic sums on unnecessary defence. And as cover for foolish American promotion of illegal colonisation programme in the West Bank.

I would be interested in hearing what you and others think of the new book: “Israel in the Second Iraq War” by former CIA analyst Stephen C. Pelletiere, PhD. The book’s subtitle is “The Influence of Likud.